Hacker News: bcook

New comment by bcook in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

bcook — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:17:46 +0000

I've only been given 1 free meal (by the manager). I just gave the entire difference as my tip. I was already going to spend the money, so why not make a random waiter happy.

New comment by bcook in "A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector"

bcook — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 08:30:57 +0000

For devices where connectivity is more important, switch them from 2.4Ghz to 5Ghz to avoid microwave interference.

New comment by bcook in "I'm a developer for a major food delivery app"

bcook — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 07:04:17 +0000

User has one comment and their karma is listed as "14" in their profile.

New comment by bcook in "From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey"

bcook — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 10:27:52 +0000

I'm just guessing, but I would say Intel CNVi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

New comment by bcook in "Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake"

bcook — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:10:57 +0000

> No thank you, I can protect myself.

There's surely some ways you're unprepared to protect yourself. Since you're unaware, you wouldn't be able to thank them. Ignorance is bliss.

New comment by bcook in "They stole my voice with AI"

bcook — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 04:45:10 +0000

With enough of a "vibration pattern", it becomes a fingerprint.

New comment by bcook in "Google Pixel 9 Pro"

bcook — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 19:39:10 +0000

I paid $1000 cash for my Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the 5½+ years with it have been flawless.

I was very hesitant to spend $1000 on my first smartphone but if it can easily last 5 years, I'm impressed.

Even now, I can't think of a reason to upgrade aside from wanting a new, shiny gadget.

New comment by bcook in "Disk write buffering and its interactions with write flushes"

bcook — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 06:37:50 +0000

Have you played with "ionice"? Did it help?

New comment by bcook in "Inflection-2.5: meet the best personal AI"

bcook — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 22:20:14 +0000

You seem angry while the person you're replying to seems calm.

New comment by bcook in "Inflection-2.5: meet the best personal AI"

bcook — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 01:16:21 +0000

What's wrong with an Adolf Hitler AI? I wouldn't consider it weird to want to interact with said AI.

Mein Kampf exists. Should it be banned?

New comment by bcook in "AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California"

bcook — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:54:35 +0000

The telephone companies seem to actively push for you to get rid of your land line. My monthly bill recently dropped $75 ($50 for local-only phone service + fees like 911), when I canceled my land line.

My 100mbit VDSL2 bonded internet line is $75, so it was a very noticeable monthly decrease. My ISP/Telco is Windstream in the eastern USA.

New comment by bcook in "Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs"

bcook — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:13:13 +0000

Which specific pages are you referring to?

New comment by bcook in "Knife Throwing Machine (2022) [video]"

bcook — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 20:48:30 +0000

As someone who has carried a pocket knife for most of my life, I very rarely think of the knife as a weapon. When I was younger, me and my friends would throw knives at trees. Sometimes we would throw hatchets at trees. It's fun and very satisfying to finally stick the knife/hatchet.

Violence was never in my thoughts.

New comment by bcook in "NAT Types"

bcook — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 10:48:04 +0000

> You don't need to lure anything.

Right. For example, in 2016, Shodan had sneakily infiltrated the NTP.org pool to harvest IPv6 IPs. The methods have obviously gotten more sophisticated and more prevalent since then.

https://netpatterns.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-rising-sophisti...

https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q1/239

New comment by bcook in "NAT Types"

bcook — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 03:43:03 +0000

The scenerio I commonly see is a dual-stack (IPv4 & IPv6) router blocking all unsolicited incoming IPv4 packets (because of NAT), while all IPv6 LAN hosts will unintentionally be globally accessible through the internet.

This is why I worry about more IPv6 deployment. Too many people are ignorantly relying on IPv4 NAT as a layer of protection.

New comment by bcook in "NAT Types"

bcook — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:13:45 +0000

> And by the way, nobody, noone forbade you from having explicit firewall rules denying anything from anywhere, not explicitly allowed. Just like it is done in a proper IPv4 configuration.

Sure, in a perfect world, migrating to IPv6 should be safe, but the default configuration on many ISP-supplied routers has no firewalling beyond what NAT offers.

New comment by bcook in "NAT Types"

bcook — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:13:58 +0000

I worry about the loss of the implicit firewall that NAT offers.

Network security audits of dual-stack networks far too often show practically no open ports on IPv4, because of NAT, while IPv6 exposes everything. The security through obscurity of the practically unscannable IPv6 address space is not a firewall.

New comment by bcook in "Offsec.tools – A vast collection of security tools"

bcook — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:22:18 +0000

Works fine here with Chrome 109.0.5414.85 on Android 12.

New comment by bcook in "Designing Logic Systems Using State Machines by Christopher R. Clare"

bcook — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 09:41:55 +0000

Try to adhere to the Hacker News Guidelines. I apologize for being annoying but we all benefit from trying to make better posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

New comment by bcook in "The M247/DataPacket Problem with Mullvad VPN"

bcook — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:45:28 +0000

Why is the article focusing on Mullvad in particular? All the complaints seem to be problems that any/all VPN providers suffer from.